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indie_games2021-10-15 05:23 pm
elf) wrote in indie_games2021-10-15 05:23 pm
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Book of Travels: Early access game
Book of Travels was a Kickstarter game that's been bringing people into beta for the last couple of months, and brought in the final batch (including me) in the last week and a half. A few days ago, it opened for early access purchase on Steam.
It's very, very pretty.
It claims to be a "TMORPG" - Tiny Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. By "tiny," they mean, "servers will only hold up to 7 players at once." So. You're mostly interacting with NPCs and the world; you usually see another player or two every few hours, but you're not making parties, much less hordes.
There are party bonus things, which kick in whenever 2+ players are in the same district. However, communication with other players is limited to a row of emotes; there is no chat. There is no PVP either, not even the non-fatal duels you can do with the "wardens."
"Serene," they call it. "Immersive." And you might get so caught up in the imagery and music (they really are great) that you miss "a unique social roleplaying experience that doesn’t hold your hand."
Translation: Tutorials are a waste of time. Also, welcome to permadeath.
BoT shenanigans so far:
* They have nerfed several combat items.
* They have adjusted several trading options that allowed for infinite profit loops.
* Many, many server crashes on the first day of Early Access sales. At once point, their approval rating dropped to 41% on Steam. Apparently they didn't plan for as many as 1000 players to be playing at once!
* This morning, they split the "US" server into "US" (meaning US-west) and "UE" (meaning US-east). Characters formerly in the "US" server seem to have been randomly split between these. (I am happy I wound up in the correct one; many players are very unhappy.)
* The combat-monster murderhobo approach is very effective. Some people are dismayed that this is encouraging newcomers to ignore "the way the game is intended to be played."
* Several of the most useful spell abilities--especially the "escape from combat" ones--don't work yet.
* However, permadeath works exactly as intended. The afterlife features that were advertised aren't available yet.
You have three "life petals." If something drains all your energy - either by starvation, or being hit by enemies - you will "faint." If you lose all 3 life petals, you die and become a ghost. You can wander the world - slowly - but you can't interact.
Oh, and you start out missing one life petal. Something about your backstory involves you joining the game with injuries AND a missing life petal. (There are relatively easy ways to get it back... as long as you're on the Discord getting the spoilers. Wandering around by yourself, you're more likely to be killed by a bandit - or server glitch - than get that point back.)
It is very, very pretty. The music is lovely. The world is rich in storylines that you discover many different ways - from NPCs, from flavor text on objects, from reading signs posted to doors, and so on.
There is no quest log. If an NPC asks you to carry this piece of machinery to her cousin in the port city, you have to just... remember that. (If you don't, when you run across that NPC again, they'll give you another wooden cog to deliver.)
Combat is (1) worthless if you don't have high stats, which come from expensive equipment and (2) occasionally very buggy, of the "oops your flee button didn't work and also this enemy sometimes does twice as much damage as it should; get ready to make a new character" variety.
You can have up to 4 characters... per server. Of course, they'd like you to just play in the server most relevant to your location... but the opening-day fiasco of constant server crashes killed that idea. Also, when you open the game, it defaults to EU servers, not whatever you left at. So if you're not in the EU, you ALWAYS have to chose a server, so you're constantly reminded that it's a choice.
We're already getting players putting characters on each servers so they have one when the other regions are down. I sure hope they weren't planning on using regional server statistics to tell them how popular the game is in different areas.
The spoilerific Discord is the only way to find out about
* The ferry and train travel bugs: If you don't log out immediately on reaching your destination, you'll be pulled along to the transit's next stop when it leaves.
* Which requests from NPCs are either meaningless flavor text or quest lines that don't exist yet - in any case, you can't bring them what they're asking for; don't bother looking.
* Which items and abilities don't work yet.
* The locations mentioned by several NPCs that you can't actually visit right now.
* The kickstarter backer bonuses that aren't active yet (one is; the others aren't)
* Picking them up in-game is buggy; you have to go the right location... and then log out & back in again.
* The fact that every server shard has time offset the real world by a more-or-less random amount; some servers are "day" and others are "night" at any given time.
* The fact that it's on a 24 hour real-world clock, other than the server offset.
* The fact that you can't die from duels with wardens; those are your practice fighting options.
* Combat is bugged - straight-up attacks etc work, but the combat-specific special skills will get you killed every time.
* That gambling doesn't have stakes yet but will someday.
* Getting stuck - there's a lot of "you're stuck and you can't move" or "you jump around on the screen instead of walking" bugs. There's an unstick-me option in the dev overlay, but it doesn't always work. The solution almost universally "log out & back in," and if that doesn't work, close the game entirely and re-open it.
Some of those are more-or-less common early access bugs. Some are this-game-specific bugs. Some are "errr, we didn't expect players to try that." Some are "we are here for the aesthetique; plz do not demand consistency." (Oh, the maps don't line up if you copy them out & try to paste them together.)
Right now, it's on sale for $26-something, down from the normal $30. Devs expect ~2 years of EA, and have content planned for 5 years. I thiiink they said they'd be increasing the base price for the new content, instead of using DLC? But I expect that might change. (I don't think that's a financially viable choice.)
I want to like this game. I am liking this game. I want very much for them to make a solo version that works offline, because I can't see this succeeding in the long run. The whole "just explore and do what you want" clashes hard with "unless what you want includes wandering in forests at night, and also, I hope you like backtracking over half the map to retrieve a single item that's the only thing you can trade with this random NPC who may not be here when you get back."
If the aesthetic appeals to you, if you like the sample videos and some of the let's plays that are showing up, but are on the fence about buying it... I strongly recommend waiting a few months. It's buggy AF and the player community is in flux.
It's very, very pretty.
It claims to be a "TMORPG" - Tiny Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. By "tiny," they mean, "servers will only hold up to 7 players at once." So. You're mostly interacting with NPCs and the world; you usually see another player or two every few hours, but you're not making parties, much less hordes.
There are party bonus things, which kick in whenever 2+ players are in the same district. However, communication with other players is limited to a row of emotes; there is no chat. There is no PVP either, not even the non-fatal duels you can do with the "wardens."
"Serene," they call it. "Immersive." And you might get so caught up in the imagery and music (they really are great) that you miss "a unique social roleplaying experience that doesn’t hold your hand."
Translation: Tutorials are a waste of time. Also, welcome to permadeath.
BoT shenanigans so far:
* They have nerfed several combat items.
* They have adjusted several trading options that allowed for infinite profit loops.
* Many, many server crashes on the first day of Early Access sales. At once point, their approval rating dropped to 41% on Steam. Apparently they didn't plan for as many as 1000 players to be playing at once!
* This morning, they split the "US" server into "US" (meaning US-west) and "UE" (meaning US-east). Characters formerly in the "US" server seem to have been randomly split between these. (I am happy I wound up in the correct one; many players are very unhappy.)
* The combat-monster murderhobo approach is very effective. Some people are dismayed that this is encouraging newcomers to ignore "the way the game is intended to be played."
* Several of the most useful spell abilities--especially the "escape from combat" ones--don't work yet.
* However, permadeath works exactly as intended. The afterlife features that were advertised aren't available yet.
You have three "life petals." If something drains all your energy - either by starvation, or being hit by enemies - you will "faint." If you lose all 3 life petals, you die and become a ghost. You can wander the world - slowly - but you can't interact.
Oh, and you start out missing one life petal. Something about your backstory involves you joining the game with injuries AND a missing life petal. (There are relatively easy ways to get it back... as long as you're on the Discord getting the spoilers. Wandering around by yourself, you're more likely to be killed by a bandit - or server glitch - than get that point back.)
It is very, very pretty. The music is lovely. The world is rich in storylines that you discover many different ways - from NPCs, from flavor text on objects, from reading signs posted to doors, and so on.
There is no quest log. If an NPC asks you to carry this piece of machinery to her cousin in the port city, you have to just... remember that. (If you don't, when you run across that NPC again, they'll give you another wooden cog to deliver.)
Combat is (1) worthless if you don't have high stats, which come from expensive equipment and (2) occasionally very buggy, of the "oops your flee button didn't work and also this enemy sometimes does twice as much damage as it should; get ready to make a new character" variety.
You can have up to 4 characters... per server. Of course, they'd like you to just play in the server most relevant to your location... but the opening-day fiasco of constant server crashes killed that idea. Also, when you open the game, it defaults to EU servers, not whatever you left at. So if you're not in the EU, you ALWAYS have to chose a server, so you're constantly reminded that it's a choice.
We're already getting players putting characters on each servers so they have one when the other regions are down. I sure hope they weren't planning on using regional server statistics to tell them how popular the game is in different areas.
The spoilerific Discord is the only way to find out about
* The ferry and train travel bugs: If you don't log out immediately on reaching your destination, you'll be pulled along to the transit's next stop when it leaves.
* Which requests from NPCs are either meaningless flavor text or quest lines that don't exist yet - in any case, you can't bring them what they're asking for; don't bother looking.
* Which items and abilities don't work yet.
* The locations mentioned by several NPCs that you can't actually visit right now.
* The kickstarter backer bonuses that aren't active yet (one is; the others aren't)
* Picking them up in-game is buggy; you have to go the right location... and then log out & back in again.
* The fact that every server shard has time offset the real world by a more-or-less random amount; some servers are "day" and others are "night" at any given time.
* The fact that it's on a 24 hour real-world clock, other than the server offset.
* The fact that you can't die from duels with wardens; those are your practice fighting options.
* Combat is bugged - straight-up attacks etc work, but the combat-specific special skills will get you killed every time.
* That gambling doesn't have stakes yet but will someday.
* Getting stuck - there's a lot of "you're stuck and you can't move" or "you jump around on the screen instead of walking" bugs. There's an unstick-me option in the dev overlay, but it doesn't always work. The solution almost universally "log out & back in," and if that doesn't work, close the game entirely and re-open it.
Some of those are more-or-less common early access bugs. Some are this-game-specific bugs. Some are "errr, we didn't expect players to try that." Some are "we are here for the aesthetique; plz do not demand consistency." (Oh, the maps don't line up if you copy them out & try to paste them together.)
Right now, it's on sale for $26-something, down from the normal $30. Devs expect ~2 years of EA, and have content planned for 5 years. I thiiink they said they'd be increasing the base price for the new content, instead of using DLC? But I expect that might change. (I don't think that's a financially viable choice.)
I want to like this game. I am liking this game. I want very much for them to make a solo version that works offline, because I can't see this succeeding in the long run. The whole "just explore and do what you want" clashes hard with "unless what you want includes wandering in forests at night, and also, I hope you like backtracking over half the map to retrieve a single item that's the only thing you can trade with this random NPC who may not be here when you get back."
If the aesthetic appeals to you, if you like the sample videos and some of the let's plays that are showing up, but are on the fence about buying it... I strongly recommend waiting a few months. It's buggy AF and the player community is in flux.